The Power Line 100: Diana Schaub

This weekend’s installment in the Power Line 100 Best Professors in America series is Diana Schaub, who teaches in the political science department at Loyola College in Maryland. She was appointed by President Bush in 2006 to the President’s Council on Bioethics, and serves also on the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on the Virtues of a Free Society. I should also mention that she teaches in the Ashbrook Center’s summer master’s degree program in history and government for high school teachers. No rest for the best!

Diana studied for her Ph.D at the University of Chicago, which means she Blooms with provocative insights on everything from . . . well, heck, let’s just let the title of one of her books speak for itself: Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. See, here’s the point: conservatives do “gender” too; we just don’t use that term. We prefer “eros” instead, and start at the beginning with the classics. (Some other time maybe we’ll spend a few minutes pondering Socrates’ argument about the natural equality of women in Book V of The Republic, which most postmodern gender feminists have probably never read, since all those ancient Greeks are the deadest of dead white males. Jean Yarbrough, who will be coming to this space soon, teaches a course at Boudoin entitled “Eros and Politics,” and let’s just say for now that Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan don’t make the reading list.) Other essays and book chapters of Schaub worth reading include “The Pillars of the Temple of Liberty,” in The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, and “The Liberation of Women: Old and New,” in The Liberal Tradition in Focus: Problems and New Perspectives, edited by Joao Carlos Espada, Marc F. Plattner, and Adam Wolfson. But my favorite has to be “Captain Kirk and the Art of Rule,” which appears in Faith, Reason, and Political Life Today, edited by Peter Lawler and Dale McConkey.

There are few better than Schaub on issues of race in America, especially the important legacy of Frederick Douglass. The very first episode of The American Mind video series with Charles Kesler features a conversation with Prof. Schaub about some of these matters which you can see here if you’re signed up with Claremont to view this series, and if you aren’t, why not?—it’s free. (The clip linked here is just one minute long, and offers Kesler’s introduction of Schaub.) Or, here’s a nice short bit (about one minute) of Schaub talking about the most salient aspects of the Lincoln and Washington monuments: